Stephane Dion’s 2008 coalition was a ‘desperate’ bid that Ignatieff says was ‘illegitimate’

OTTAWA – Former federal Liberal Leader Michael Ignatieff has launched a searing broadside against his predecessor, Stephane Dion, for trying to take power in 2008 with an “illegitimate” coalition, saying it looked like the work of “a desperate leader” who clung to power through a “coup de theatre.”

The details are contained in Ignatieff’s new book, Fire and Ashes, in which he recounts with candid self-criticism how his five years in politics were marked by both success and failure.

The book describes how Ignatieff opposed the plan for a Liberal-NDP coalition, even once he replaced Dion as leader, and how he was pressured by NDP leader Jack Layton to embrace a deal that could have made him prime minister in 2009.

As well, Ignatieff bluntly describes how internal party rivalry fractured his long-time friendship with Bob Rae, who didn’t believe Ignatieff had “earned the right” to accomplish his political ambitions.

On the coalition, Ignatieff writes that nothing had ever been proposed in Canada before similar to the Liberal-NDP deal that was crafted to remove Prime Minister Stephen Harper’s government from power.

“It came as a thunderclap, especially to me. Although I was the party’s deputy leader, I had been excluded from the secret negotiations with the other parties.” Referring to Dion, he writes, “What I saw was a desperate leader clinging to power by any means, resorting to a coup de theatre to survive.”

“The problem was not a coalition itself. You can make coalitions among winners.”

“In our case, it was a coalition of losers. The government had just increased it seats in the House of Commons, while we had lost seats. How were we to explain to the people that we were throwing out a government duly re-elected two months before?”

Ignatieff was lured in 2004 from his comfortable perch as a Harvard professor to a political career in his homeland — only to lose one Liberal leadership race, and later, as leader, see his party suffer its worst-ever defeat in the 2011 election.

“There were times when I felt I was shaping and moulding events, other times when I watched helplessly as events slipped out of my control,” he writes.

“I knew moments of exaltation when I thought I might be able to do great things for the people, and now I live with the regret that I will never be able to do anything at all. In short, I lived the life. I paid for what I learned. I pursued the flame of power and saw hope dwindle to ashes.”

Among the highlights in the book:

Despite Liberal attacks in the 2008 election, Ignatieff did not regard Harper as a “right-wing ideologue,” but rather as a disciplined and ruthless politician with “no fixed compass other than the pursuit of power.”

Rae, whose friendship with Ignatieff stretched back to university, “exploded” when Ignatieff told him he was going into politics. Ignatieff writes the former Ontario premier had his own federal ambitions — confirmed when the two ran unsuccessfully for the leadership in 2006.

“He was an able politician, a lifer longing for redemption. As far as he was concerned, he had earned his chance and I hadn’t earned mine.”

The Conservatives’ negative attack ads, which painted Ignatieff as an opportunist who was “just visiting” Canada from Harvard, worked “brilliantly,” he now admits, but left the political system worse off.

Although Ignatieff’s Liberals tried to pinpoint the Harper government’s abuse of Parliament as a key issue, the public “reacted with a yawn.”

“So instead of getting the democracy they deserve, voters end up paying for their own disillusion.”

In an interview with Postmedia News Monday, Ignatieff said he wrote the book to provide Canadians a look at what politics is really like.

“These are not stories told to settle scores,” he said, adding that Rae’s reaction to his own political ambition was “very human.”

“Seen from his point of view, he’d been the premier of a province. He’d been in federal politics for years. He’d been in politics for years and he thought ‘Who the hell is this guy? Who does he think he is?’ I understand that humanly. But in an honest account of what politics is like, you have to tell stories like that because you want to tell it like it was.”

About Dion, he said his predecessor “burst” the coalition plan on to the Liberal caucus, and that it landed like a “bombshell” with Canadians.

“Let’s give him the benefit of the doubt. He genuinely thought that Mr. Harper was terrible for the country. But it didn’t look so good. That’s for sure.”

Ignatieff, who teaches at the University of Toronto and Harvard, said he wants young Canadians to enter politics.

“I want them to step up. I don’t want them to be put off by some of the more disillusioning spectacles in our politics.”

Ignatieff writes forcefully about the coalition crisis in late 2008 sparked by the government’s economic update.

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He writes he was left out of the loop when then-party leader Dion reversed his decision to quit the leadership and instead strike a deal to form a coalition government with the NDP, to be backed by the Bloc Quebecois in the Commons.

The plan was to defeat Harper’s recently re-elected minority government in the House and seek the governor general’s consent to take office.

“It was an episode that serves to remind just how unfathomable behaviour can be in politics,” Ignatieff writes of Dion. “Here was a principled political leader with a fine reputation for standing up to separatist rhetoric in Quebec, now making a secret deal with the leader of a separatist party.

“Here was a leader who had written eloquently about politics, now unable to explain the coalition in simple terms voters could understand. Here was a constitutional expert who failed to grasp that a coalition, however legitimate it might be in theory, lacked all legitimacy in reality.”

He was instructed by Dion to sign a document supporting the coalition – which Ignatieff did because he feared refusal could have “blown the party apart.” He and Montreal MP Irwin Cotler were the last to sign.

Harper prorogued Parliament and prevented an early-December vote in the Commons. Dion quickly gave up, leaving the Liberal caucus to turn to Ignatieff as leader.

Ignatieff reveals he met secretly over Christmas with Layton, who “implored” him to form a coalition.

In later weeks, Ignatieff publicly said he was prepared for that if necessary, but he writes it was essentially a tactic to pressure the government to adopt economic stimulus measures.

He knew what would await him if he became prime minister.

“At every public appearance, I was sure to be greeted with a demonstration of citizens accusing me of stealing the job.”

Sometime in future, he writes, a Liberal-NDP “realignment” might have the right conditions. But they weren’t there in 2008.

“So I turned down the coalition, not knowing that as I did so, I had just given up my one chance to be the prime minister of my country.”